Its interesting. I work managing a data center/managed services provider that lives in Kansas City. They are enterprise vendors and support Visa’s application that I am focused on building out additional infrastructure, environments, and training for. They have a quality of service ethic bar none. When they say a thing will get done, its done. I think this quality extends to smaller companies as well that they support. Their NOC is topnotch and answers flow pretty quickly back to us.
I know that they are different than what we get when we deal with hosting services. A hosting service never really announces their SLA unless they do enterprise solutions or support. A Service Level Agreement stipulates what each party agrees to is reasonable and prudent given what is being provided. I write those on occasion so I have an idea what they contain. I’ve dealt with a few of the so-called best of breed like Siteground and Lunarpages. They are all missing something. I think its the philosophical tenet that the customer is always right. They seem to spin off on service guarantees, delivery times, etc. But when push comes to shove they simply cannot deliver.
I’ve been waiting now for over a day to get a simple answer from Lunarpages. My mail server may have eaten some email. My bad and I take the blame. Spamassassin was a bad boy. I wrote back saying please resend. That was 5 hours ago. My question:
What in the hell would happen if I had a critical service down? If I depended on my apache web server for something? I guess I would fit within some other service guarantee. Perhaps I am too demanding. I think I will ask our Senior System Administrator that manages our data center. What is reasonable when dealing with a hosting provider? Is it reasonable to expect an answer to email even if its automated? A real person to look at the question within an hour? If you pay a few hundred for a bargain basement IP, network, web, mail deal; what is the expectation of service?
I’m not sure; but I don’t like the ground I see. I don’t think there is a demonstrable quality of service guarantee when it comes to the thousands of hosting companies. They just offer, take, and every once in awhile get bought up by someone else. Kinda like what went on with the local neighborhood ISPs here in SF some years ago.
But that’s another rant. I’m lucky to have Rawbandwidth I think.
